I’d like to report that he said that to me in an email. He didn’t…in his defense, though, I didn’t try to get to him. But he did say it to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, and I read TechCrunch, so that’s almost the same thing. Right?

MA: You just bought Interactive Supercomputing a couple of days ago now. Why?

SB: Well, one of the big pushes for us, we, we’re in the server business, if you .. if you look at all the things people do with servers today, we do pretty well at most of them. The two areas in which we have, are least successful are web, where about half the web servers are Windows and half are Linux, we’re competing, and workin’ at it; and the other one is high performance computing. Scientific supercomputing-like applications. And the truth of the matter is, this is never about price, it’s always about, have we done enough to solve problems, compared with what you could do with the roll-your-own of Linux and Open Source. We took a look at it and said, no, we really want to be in the high performance computing, super computing space, and we’re gonna get after it. We’re gonna get after it with infrastructure, we’re gonna get after it with tools and applications, and as part of that strategy, we made the, uh, deal to acquire Interactive Super Computing.

Comments

I honestly think Microsoft being in the space is great for HPC! People are starting to think about ease of use tools and how to make HPC easier. The independant software vendors of HPC tools are definitely taking notice, you’re starting to see all sorts of ease of use tools starting to pop up that weren’t there a few years ago. Is this Microsoft driven or was it already happening, maybe or maybe not but I think on a whole HPC is becoming easier and this competition is good!

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